Avengers: Endgame—Is Thor’s New Look More Than Just a Joke?

“I feel like we came out of the gate strong with the first Thor, and then it got watered down a bit. I take responsibility for that,” says Chris Hemsworth. But with Ragnarok, everything changed—and in Endgame, the Norse god enters a whole new phase.

Avengers: Endgame is such a carefully guarded property that even the film’s title was kept a secret until the last possible moment. There are so many surprises involved in the final fight between the original Avengers team and the big purple menace Thanos that anything at all can be considered a spoiler. So go ahead and scoot if you don’t want to know how it all ends.

Though you’d never know it from those sneakily edited trailers, Chris Hemsworth’s Thor is sporting a very different look in Avengers: Endgame. After killing Thanos in the film’s opening scrum—but failing to bring back all the people who were dusted in Infinity War—Thor spends the next five years in hiding in New Asgard, drinking his regret, self-hatred, and P.T.S.D. into a more comfortable state of numbness. When Rocket and Hulk go to recruit Thor to try to fix the Infinity Stone debacle, they find more than just a changed attitude.

The once cut and golden god now has matted hair, a scraggly, unkempt beard and, most controversially, a large beer gut. Some of the humor based on Thor’s look is, rightfully, getting shredded by film fans tired of seeing fat people as the butt of jokes. On the other hand, the film spends a good deal of time sensitively exploring Thor’s pain in an unusual—and somewhat meta—portrait of a hero who feels like he’s failed.

First and foremost, let’s get the bad of this particular story line out of the way. There are those who feel that fat suits or C.G.I. padding should never be used at all in film or television—and especially not as a source of humor. Fat men and women are only just starting to see themselves reflected on-screen as fully formed humans, rather than just punch lines. Any sensitivity around the subject is understandable.

For the most part, the film does avoid fat jokes at Thor’s expense—with even Tony lobbing only an uncharacteristically diplomatic “Lebowski” comment in the God of Thunder’s direction. When Tony says that Thor is in no condition to try to wear their makeshift Infinity Gauntlet, he seems to intend something more emotional than physical.

Sure, Thor’s mother, Frigga (Rene Russo), gently suggests that he try eating a salad, while the acid-tongued Rocket (Bradley Cooper), unsurprisingly, is the main culprit of the cutting remarks. (We have to admit that’s entirely in character for the raccoon.) The one joke that really feels in bad taste comes from Rhodey (Don Cheadle)—an otherwise nice enough and heroic guy who wonders if Thor has “Cheez Whiz” running through his veins. It’s out of place with the empowering tone of the film.

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But if it’s possible to see past the in-poor-taste weight humor, there is something deeper at play here. Thor’s look is as much about this particular depressed person’s inability to exhibit any measure of self-care as anything else. (Yes, not all fat people are depressed; not all depressed people are fat. Though certainly, some are.) What’s crucial about Thor’s journey through the film is that once he begins to work through his pain and crisis with the help of his mother, he becomes ready for the fight not by getting trim. Instead, he cleans himself up. The beard is braided; the hair cleaner and pulled back. Still a big guy, he’s ready for the fight.

Hemsworth delivers some of the most emotionally resonant acting in the entire film when he’s able to call his old weapon, Mjölnir, to his side and realizes he’s still a worthy hero. “Everyone fails at who they are supposed to be,” Frigga tells him. “The measure of a person, a hero, is how they succeed at being who they are.” And in this, we get the film’s most meta-commentary about one of its actors.

Speaking with Vanity Fair on the set of Avengers: Endgame in October 2017, Hemsworth reflected back on his first few outings playing the self-serious, Shakespearean Thor that Kevin Feige and the Marvel team originally dreamed up. The actor said he was frustrated and bored. Like the depressed Thor in Endgame, Hemsworth was unable to be the hero he thought Marvel wanted him to be: “I feel like we came out of the gate strong with the first Thor, and then it got watered down a bit. I take responsibility for that. I’m not pointing fingers at writers or directors. But then it became predictable or overly earnest, self-important, and serious. Nothing that was unexpected.”

After critically mixed outings in Thor: The Dark World and Avengers: Age of Ultron, the crimson-caped Thor had lost his mojo. He sat out the next Avengers team-up, Civil War, entirely while the plans for the third solo Thor movie got a major overhaul. At a meeting that some in Hollywood might consider unusual, Feige not only listened to his star’s concerns—he took notes. “I feel l like I’m dying here,” Hemsworth told Feige. “I feel like I have handcuffs on.”

“It has to be funnier; it has to be unpredictable,” the actor remembered saying. “Tonally, we’ve just got to wipe the table again.” That reset for Thor—and a massive infusion of improvisational humor—came courtesy of Thor: Ragnarok director Taika Waititi, who helped transform Marvel’s most stately and straitlaced property into a zany, no-holds-barred adventure that gave Guardians of the Galaxy competition for the oddball crown. That film cheekily ripped the standard idea of Thor to shreds—cutting his hair and stripping him of his cape, his hammer, his home, his girlfriend, his friends. All of which was Hemsworth’s idea. The only Thor accessories to survive the original films in Ragnarok were his adopted brother, Loki (Tom Hiddleston), and a significantly more rough-and-tumble version of the gatekeeper Heimdall (Idris Elba). By the time the prologue of Avengers: Infinity War was over, those two were gone as well.

“When we started Hemsworth on Thor,” Feige told me back in 2017, “he has blond hair; he has a hammer; he has a cape. These are the things that make Thor. He has now appeared as that character so many times [that] Chris Hemsworth is Thor. So we cut his hair, we got rid of his hammer, and it’s still him.”

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Feige may have been confident in the power of his star, but for a long time in the Avengers franchise, Hemsworth was enormously unsure of himself. “I thought maybe I might be in the first Avengers,” he told me. “But I never thought there’d be a second one. I didn’t look that comfortable on my first three films. I gotta say, recently, it felt more concrete. But before, it always felt like any minute, it all might be pulled out from under me.”

But by the time Endgame rolled around—and so many of his castmates were ready to say goodbye—Hemsworth was just getting started on this newer, funnier Thor. Sitting opposite from me, his greasy wig lank and his unkempt beard scraggly, Hemsworth said he was finally playing Thor as he was meant to, not as he was expected to. This is the exact lesson Frigga imparts to her heartbroken son in Endgame.

“It’s time to be who I am instead of who I’m supposed to be,” Thor tells Valkyrie (Tessa Thompson) as Endgame wraps up. Not a pound lighter, but significantly cleaner, Thor passes the mantle of the leader of Asgard to her. He then jumps onboard with the Guardians of the Galaxy—a film franchise much more in line with the comedy chops Hemsworth has displayed elsewhere, with winning appearances on Saturday Night Live and in 2015’s Vacation and 2016’s Ghostbusters.

Sitting on the set of Endgame in 2017, watching Hemsworth improvise zinger after zinger through that tumbleweed of a beard, Robert Downey Jr. told me he was excited for the actor’s future in the Marvel Cinematic Universe—even if it meant soldiering on without the original Avengers by his side: “I don’t even know how to express my joy at Chris’s vibe right now. Hemsworth. Dude, it’s just too great.”

“Some people come out of the gates with all the confidence in the world,” Hemsworth said of his long period of uncertainty in the M.C.U., “and I think I was always looking for someone to steer me in the right direction.” What Hemsworth eventually found was the ability to guide his own ship straight into one of the more poignant story lines that Endgame has to offer. Thor doesn’t get a big death like Tony—but, like Cap, he gets to retire from the unreasonable expectations he’s put on himself. It’s astonishing that screenwriters Christopher Markus and Stephen McFeely were able to build such a powerful, personal, and meta-story of reinvention for Hemsworth into this massive studio blockbuster. It’s just a shame about the unnecessary fat jokes along the way.